Tag Archives: audience choice

Pirate Week has been, I think, the most fun I’ve ever had running a contest. It’s had the biggest prizes, the highest number of submissions, and the most reader involvement, through the Audience Choice Award voting. Thank you so, so much to everyone who sent a story in, commented on and rated their favourites, and voted like crazy in the Audience Choice poll! I’m blown away by the number of votes the poll received.

I want to send out a special thank you to Todd Battaglia and his Grade 7 Language Arts classes. Todd assigned the Pirate Week 50-word story challenge to his classes and sent me the results of what his students came up with. I was only able to pick five stories out of that collection, to avoid flooding the site with too many stories all at once, but I read, enjoyed, and appreciated every story I received. And that goes for all of the other submissions that I wasn’t able to post on the site, too!

The Results

Now here’s the information everyone wants to see! First, the Audience Choice Award, as voted on by the readers, goes to Brandon King for his story Hospitality. Congratulations, Brandon! As a prize, I will be emailing Brandon to get his input on the next Captain Blackbird short story.

On to the Grand Prize winner and the runner-up prize winners. I know this is “the thing to say,” but it’s really been difficult for me to choose a winner from among the five finalists. After deliberating long and hard, however, I’ve come to my conclusions.

Congratulations to Abby, Cameron, and Brandon, and also to King Kool and John H. Dromey, our other finalists. Your stories were all really excellent! I will be emailing you soon so you can claim your prizes.

Captain Whiskers the ruthless kitty pirate had slit many throats to get this treasure. The first mate hammered the lock open and pushed the lid off the chest. He poured out the gold and jewels within, but Captain Whiskers didn’t seem interested, instead playing with the box it came in.

The five stories going up tomorrow (Friday, February 24) are all finalists for the Grand Prize and for Audience Choice Award voting. Here’s how it’s all going to work:

The five stories will go up over the course of the day. After the last finalist has been posted, I will post a poll for Audience Choice voting. The poll will remain open until midnight PST on Tuesday, February 28. Whichever story has received the most votes by the time the poll closes will win the Audience Choice Award.

On Wednesday, February 29, I will post the Audience Choice Award winner and the winners of the Grand Prize and the two runner-up prizes.

I hope everyone has been enjoying Pirate Week, and I’m sure you’ll all enjoy the finalists!

Did you think the awesome collection of prizes for Pirate Week was big? Well it’s about to expand again!

In addition to giving out prizes to one winner and two runners up, I’ll be making a selection of stories available on Friday for Audience Choice voting. Whoever wins the Audience Choice Award will be given a very special prize: they will have input into the next Captain Blackbird pirate adventure short story I write!

I hope everyone’s looking forward to reading all the great stories that are going to be posted this week. I’ll be posting about six stories each day, so check back throughout the day if you won’t want to miss anything.

Also, since I received so many entries I won’t be posting any stories that I wrote myself this week. I have enough work to do scheduling them all and doing the judging! :)